Living the Change

Together with a broad range of faith and non-faith partners, we are launching today a new sustainability initiative and encouraging your participation. The core of this campaign is an invitation to, in the context of supportive community, face the difficulty of our unsustainable personal and household carbon emissions and then, grounded in our deepest values, commit to meaningful response. Specifically, the campaign is calling for

Courageous, compassionate sharing
To build community, learn from one another and normalize these efforts, we invite participates to share their experiences with keeping commitments, the challenges, rewards, beautiful surprises, vexing frustrations, spiritual insights and logistical roadblocks encountered along the way.

Affirm Goodness
Join people within and across spiritual communities in local events celebrating our efforts to Live the Change during Earth Care Week, October 7 – 14.

Earth is a blessing. She supports life and is the basis of all our economies. She conveys beauty and evokes our recognition of something greater than ourselves. She is our temple, our mosque, our sanctuary, our cathedral. Our home.— Living the Change campaign

GreenFaith and our funding partners believe that people can make and sustain significant changes in their lives when they are grounded in their deepest values and supported by communities of meaning. In this energized collaboration, One Earth Sangha is honored to represent Mindfulness and Buddhist communities in partnering with The Bhumi Project, representing Hindus; the Global Muslim Climate Network; Hazon representing the Jewish faith, The Global Catholic Climate Movement, Living Witness, representing Quakers; even the World Evangelical Alliance representing Evangelical Christians and more. In a time when divisiveness is on the rise, we are deeply inspired by this diverse set of organizations in beautiful cooperation, each sharing both the particular gifts and challenges of our Paths, in this project to honor and protect life.

You Might Have Questions

But you might have questions. Together, we’ll be exploring the beauty and the very real challenges in this campaign in the coming weeks and months. Even in our own conversations, we wrestle with difficulties and want to open these up with you. Questions like,

Isn’t this a distraction from the real change we need in public policy and checks on corporations? Don’t we all need to keep our focus on systems change?

Even if they are not a distraction, at this stage, do household sustainability measures really matter?

What about the unsustainable behavior of communities, organizations and governments?

Do people really change their behavior and if so how?

How can we break the deafening silence on climate without alienating others or isolating ourselves?

And anyways, what does all this have to do with my practice, Dharma or Mindfulness?

Connect, Connect, Connect

The campaign is just underway. We’re hoping you will be able to participate in the following support events, which are all about making connections, and even organize your own.

Get inspired by people actually working together across lines of difference in multi-faith collaboration at LivingTheChange.net.

Join One Earth Sangha and Spirit Rock Meditation Center for a day of inspiration and practice at our daylong on September 15, Loving this Earth: Engaging Mindfully in the Healing of Our World. This event will take place at Spirit Rock the day after the close of the Global Climate Action Summit will also be live-streamed from the Spirit Rock website so that all may join in. Learn more and register your interest in the in-person event here.

Pledge and share your pledge. Using the tool that we co-developed with GreenFaith, commit to reduce personal emissions and then share that with one person, a few friends, your sangha or social media followers.

Finally, while on the topic of Earth Care Week, just like in previous years, the final Sunday, October 14 of Earth Care Week marks the opening to this fall’s EcoSattva Training with a community webinar. Registration and more details coming soon, but you might want to start gathering interest and planning your meeting times!

Our Partners

One Earth Sangha is honored to work on this initiative, organized by GreenFaith, with our partners from Mindfulness and other spiritual traditions.

Are you inspired, concerned, skeptical, excited, nonplussed? Great. We want to hear from you in the comments below!

May our collective efforts nourish the potential for a new way to flourish, a diverse, justice-oriented and sustainable way, that protects and respects beings, similar and different, near and far, born and unborn.

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6 Comments on “Living the Change”

Hi all. I’m a Druid whobhas taken refuge but I am working with earth-centric spirituality. I am not one of the main religions you have described. What could I do to be supported by you all if I sign up? Druid practice naturally incorporates a spiritual awareness of interconnectedness and simplicity. But there is ALWAYS more we can do as individuals within a community.

Hi Harriet,
Although I’m not a facilitator of this event, I have participated in another training by the folks who are organizing it. I took part in the EcoSattva series and can say- without reservation- that you’ll feel supported and a general sense of love being generated by the folks doing this. The EcoSattva training brought in Native American speakers and they referenced the Living the Change Network. I learned as much from taking in the embodiment of speakers, as I did the information they presented.

Not sure if this is helpful but I did want to say hi and encourage you to try the training.
Be well…

I was wondering if the Eco-Sattvas and One Earth Sangha leaders would be interested in coordinating a nation-wide and even international project I call the Buddhist Resilience Network. It’s based on my ten-year practice with and study of the Transition Towns movement, its successes and challenges. I believe the Transition Towns model could work at the local level, even with very small groups of committed Buddhists, who would then be networked together for a greater regional, national and international impact on climate change. In particular, I have studied a Buddhist-led Transition group in Nova Scotia that is having a major impact on their region. Resilience is a unifying concept that scales up from the personal/spiritual to the local/household/community to the global. I am beginning to put this idea together, and I’m willing to work as the coordinator, and to share that role with anyone else who would like to co-organize with me. If you are interested, please let me know. If you are not interested, please also let me know that too, so that I know where to focus my time and energy. Thanks for all the work you are doing.